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canopic jug writes:

The Czech capital will be led by a 'Pirate' mayor for the next four years. The three coalition partners responsible for choosing the mayor have agreed that Prague's new mayor will be Zdeněk Hřib, who is 37 years old and current leader of the Czech pirate party. One of the first goals will be to focus on ridding the city of its dependence on a limited amount of IT suppliers, hopefully leading to lowered expenses and greater efficiency. Another goal is to facilitate digitization of some currently paper-based government services. The party has also been aiming at fighting corruption, reforming tax regulations, and overhauling the country's copyright legislation.

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takyon writes:

Meet the E-Nose That Actually Sniffs

In addition to sniffing, their device, named TruffleBot, measures small pressure and temperature changes—physical characteristics that can be used to identify a smell. For example, here's a fun fact for your next happy hour: Beer odors cause a slight decrease in air pressure and a slight rise in temperature due to the physical properties of the alcohol vapor.

In a paper presented last week in Cleveland at the BioCAS2018 conference, Rosenstein's team showed that the addition of this new information in an e-nose raises the device's accuracy from 80 percent to 95 percent.

E-noses come in a variety of architectures, but most rely exclusively on chemical sensors, such as metal oxides or conducting polymers. The TruffleBot goes a step further: A 3.5-inch-by-2-inch circuit board that sits atop a Raspberry Pi contains eight pairs of sensors in four rows of two. Each sensor pair includes a chemical sensor to detect vapors and a mechanical sensor (a digital barometer) to measure air pressure and temperature.

Then comes the sniffing bit: Odor samples are pushed across these sensors by small air pumps that can be programmed to take up puffs of air in a pattern. "When animals want to smell something, they don't just passively expose themselves to the chemical. They're actively sniffing for it—sampling the air and moving around—so the signals that are being received are not static," says Rosenstein.

In an analysis of nine odors, including those from cider vinegar, lime juice, beer, wine, and vodka (and using ambient air as a control), the team found that chemical sensors alone accurately identified an odor about 80 percent of the time. The addition of sniffing improved accuracy to 90 percent. Throw in the pressure and temperature readings and the e-nose recognized an odor 95 percent of the time.

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takyon writes:

Walmart will sell two laptops and a desktop PC designed in collaboration with Esports Arena:

Companies like Alienware might dominate the pre-built gaming desktop and laptop PCs, but Walmart is throwing down the gauntlet today. The company has launched its own line of powerful gaming rigs, as spotted by PC Gamer.

These machines come in three different flavors: two laptops, and a single gaming desktop. The specifications are pretty outstanding, but they come at a cost, which we'll get into later. All of the machines fall under Walmart's new "Overpowered" (OP) product line, and they're the result of the retail giant's recent collaboration with Esports Arena.

Who's next? Tesco?

Also at CNET.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Watch closely as NASA deploys the world's biggest parachute at supersonic speeds

NASA engineers have launched a gigantic parachute as big as a size of a house[sic] at record speed to prepare for its Mars 2020 mission.

The object, dubbed ASPIRE (Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiments), unfolded from a small cylinder to a massive parachute, weighing over 80 kilograms (180 pounds), in just four-tenths of a second.

ASPIRE was tested earlier this year in September. NASA hopes that it can be used to slow down a spacecraft carrying the Mars 2020 rover so that the vehicle can slow in the upper atmosphere. The parachute will then detach and the spacecraft will fire up rockets, hover over the surface and then lower the rover to the surface of the Red Planet.

[...] The parachute was carried aboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket travelling at nearly twice the speed of sound (343 meters per second). After two minutes, the rocket reached the appropriate altitude of 38 kilometers - where the atmosphere of Earth thins and mimics the one on Mars - and released the parachute.

[...] In one swift expansion, it created a drag force of a whopping 311,375 Newtons (70,000 pounds of force). ASPIRE's canopy stretches over 20 meters in diameter and is made out of nylon and Kevlar. It's held together by over three million stitches and carried by threads of Technora, a strong synthetic fibre.

Youtube Video

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takyon writes:

The World's Tiniest Optical Gyroscope is Now Smaller Than a Grain of Rice

[Microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS)] are limited in their sensitivity, so engineers have also developed superior optical gyroscopes that perform with better accuracy and with the omission of moving parts. To do this these devices rely on a phenomenon referred to as the Sagnac effect.

Named after French physicist Georges Sagnac, this optical effect rooted in Einstein's theory of general relativity works by seeing the optical gyroscope split a beam of light into two and then rotate to manipulate the arrival of the now separate beams at its detector.

[...] Although very useful, so far even the best high-performance optical gyroscopes have been bigger than a golf ball and therefore incompatible with most of today's portable electronics. Previous attempts to build smaller versions of these high-precision devices, unfortunately, have always resulted in a reduced Sagnac effect signal and therefore reduced reliability and accuracy.

Now, a team of Caltech engineers led by Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, have found a way to shrink these devices while at the same time improving their accuracy. The discovery is bound to forever change the use of optical gyroscopes, likely making them even more popular and ever-present than MEMS. Caltech's novel optical gyroscope is 500 times smaller than the best devices currently available, making it smaller than a grain of rice, yet it can detect phase shifts 30 times smaller than even the most precise models out there. To do this, the tiny device uses something called "reciprocal sensitivity enhancement."

Also at Caltech.

Nanophotonic optical gyroscope with reciprocal sensitivity enhancement (DOI: 10.1038/s41566-018-0266-5) (DX) (correction)

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takyon writes:

Number of Habitable Exoplanets Found by NASA's Kepler May Not Be So High After All

The tally of potentially habitable alien planets may have to be revised downward a bit. To date, NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope has discovered about 30 roughly Earth-size exoplanets in their host stars' "habitable zone" — the range of orbital distances at which liquid water can likely exist on a world's surface.

Or so researchers had thought. New observations by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia spacecraft suggest that the actual number is probably significantly smaller — perhaps between two and 12, NASA officials said today (Oct. 26)

[...] Gaia's observations suggest that some of the Kepler host stars are brighter and bigger than previously believed, the officials added. Planets orbiting such stars are therefore likely larger and hotter than previously thought.

Also at NASA.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Mountain birds on 'escalator to extinction' as planet warms

A meticulous re-creation of a 3-decade-old study of birds on a mountainside in Peru has given scientists a rare chance to prove how the changing climate is pushing species out of the places they are best adapted to.

Surveys of more than 400 species of birds in 1985 and then in 2017 have found that populations of almost all had declined, as many as eight had disappeared completely, and nearly all had moved to higher elevations in what scientists call "an escalator to extinction."

"Once you move up as far as you can go, there's nowhere else left," said John W. Fitzpatrick, a study author and director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. "On this particular mountain, some ridgetop bird populations were literally wiped out."

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MrPlow writes in with a submission via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd:

Amid a flurry of national proposals to bring exorbitant U.S. drug prices in line with other countries’ charges, one Utah insurer has a different option for patients:

Pay them to go to Mexico.

PEHP, which covers 160,000 public employees and family members, is offering plane tickets to San Diego, transportation to Tijuana, and a $500 cash payout to patients who need certain expensive drugs for multiple sclerosis, cancer and autoimmune disorders.

“That money is pretty small in comparison to the difference between U.S. prices and Mexico prices,” said Travis Tolley, clinical operations director for PEHP.

The insurer rolled out its “pharmacy tourism” option this fall in response to state legislation requiring state employees’ insurance plans to offer “savings rewards,” or cash incentives, to patients who choose cheaper providers.

PEHP is offering pharmacy tourism benefits for about a dozen drugs for which the price disparity between countries is vast. For example, Avonex, which treats MS, costs about $6,700 for a 28-day supply in the U.S., but about $2,200 through PEHP’s contracted clinic in Tijuana.

upstart writes in with a submission from IRC:

Trump complains about Twitter removing his followers

US President Donald Trump complained Friday that Twitter is removing some of his followers and has made it harder to join, an apparent critique of the social network's efforts to weed out fake and abusive accounts.

Trump, who has some 55 million Twitter followers, revived his argument about "bias" by internet firms in a morning tweet[*] that suggested growth in his network was slowing.

[...] Trump's remarks appeared aimed at Twitter's efforts to weed out fake and "spam" accounts to improve the health and safety of the platform.

For months, Twitter has sought to eliminate automated and bogus accounts designed to manipulate the public conversation on Twitter, in response to concerns over Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Twitter said this week the number of active users fell by nine million in the past quarter as a result of these efforts.

Asked about the president's comments, a Twitter spokesman said: "Our focus is on the health of the service, and that includes work to remove fake accounts to prevent malicious behavior.

"Many prominent accounts have seen follower counts drop, but the result is higher confidence that the followers they have are real, engaged people."

[*] Tweet source:

Donald J. Trump on Twitter

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "Twitter has removed many people from my account and, more importantly, they have seemingly done something that makes it much harder to join - they have stifled growth to a point where it is obvious to all. A few weeks ago it was a Rocket Ship, now it is a Blimp! Total Bias?"

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Hyperloop startup says construction on Abu Dhabi track will commence in Q3 2019

This week, startup Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (otherwise known as HyperloopTT) announced that it would start building a commercial Hyperloop track as well as an "XO Square Innovation Center" and a "Hyperloop Experience Center" in Abu Dhabi, capitol city of the United Arab Emirates. Construction will commence in the third quarter of 2019, HyperloopTT claimed.

It’s been 5 years since Elon Musk proposed a Hyperloop designThe news seems to extend an agreement made public in April. That's when HyperloopTT and a state-controlled real-estate developer announced the acquisition of a construction site where a six-mile (10km) commercial track would be built from Abu Dhabi, with the hopes of reaching Dubai.

HyperloopTT and its competing startup, Virgin Hyperloop One, have attracted $31.2 million and $196.2 million in investment, respectively. Both startups regularly conduct feasibility studies for hyperloop systems in locations across the globe, and they announce agreements with governments eager to cash in on hyperloop's theoretical potential.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Analysis of North Korea's Internet Traffic Shows a Nation Run Like a Criminal Syndicate

Recorded Future has published a series of analyses on North Korea's most senior leadership's use of the internet. As the last report of the series, it demonstrates how adaptable this leadership has become in both using and monetizing its use of the internet.

The leadership's pattern of global internet usage has shifted. A year ago, it peaked at the weekends, primarily for online gaming and video streaming. Over the last year, weekday usage has increased while weekend use has decreased (although weekend use is still primarily for gaming and streaming). Recorded Future does not know why this shift has occurred, but suggests that it is indicative of the global internet becoming a greater part of the leaders' every day work.

Concurrent with this pattern change has been the construction of North Korea's new Internet Communications Bureau headquarters in Pyongyang. The combination of changing usage patterns and the completion of this building could, suggests Recorded Future, "signify a professionalization of internet use across North Korea's most senior leadership. This would mean that these leaders utilize the internet to a greater extent as part of their jobs, as opposed to for their own entertainment."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

"Schrödinger's Bacterium" Could Be a Quantum Biology Milestone

The quantum world is a weird one. In theory and to some extent in practice its tenets demand that a particle can appear to be in two places at once—a paradoxical phenomenon known as superposition—and that two particles can become "entangled," sharing information across arbitrarily large distances through some still-unknown mechanism.

[...] Coles and company sequestered several hundred photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria between two mirrors, progressively shrinking the gap between the mirrors down to a few hundred nanometers—less than the width of a human hair. By bouncing white light between the mirrors, the researchers hoped to cause the photosynthetic molecules within the bacteria to couple—or interact—with the cavity, essentially meaning the bacteria would continuously absorb, emit and reabsorb the bouncing photons. The experiment was successful; up to six bacteria did appear to couple in this manner.

[...] There are many caveats to such controversial claims, however. First and foremost, the evidence for entanglement in this experiment is circumstantial, dependent on how one chooses to interpret the light trickling through and out of the cavity-confined bacteria. Marletto and her colleagues acknowledge a classical model free of quantum effects could also account for the experiment's results. But, of course, photons are not classical at all—they are quantum.

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takyon writes:

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) researchers announced a Tech breakthrough to allow 100-times-faster internet:

Broadband fiber-optics carry information on pulses of light, at the speed of light, through optical fibers. But the way the light is encoded at one end and processed at the other affects data speeds. This world-first nanophotonic device, published [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06952-1] [DX] in Nature Communications, encodes more data and processes it much faster than conventional fiber optics by using a special form of 'twisted' light.

Dr Haoran Ren from RMIT's School of Science, who was co-lead author of the paper, said the tiny nanophotonic device they have built for reading twisted light is the missing key required to unlock super-fast, ultra-broadband communications. "Present-day optical communications are heading towards a 'capacity crunch' as they fail to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of Big Data," Ren said. "What we've managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth."

[...] This latest technology, at the cutting edge of optical communications, carries data on light waves that have been twisted into a spiral to increase their capacity further still. This is known as light in a state of orbital angular momentum, or OAM.

In 2016 the same group from RMIT's Laboratory of Artificial-Intelligence Nanophotonics (LAIN) published a disruptive research paper in Science journal describing how they'd managed to decode a small range of this twisted light on a nanophotonic chip. But technology to detect a wide range of OAM light for optical communications was still not viable, until now.

[...] "It fits the scale of existing fiber technology and could be applied to increase the bandwidth, or potentially the processing speed, of that fiber by over 100 times within the next couple of years. This easy scalability and the massive impact it will have on telecommunications is what's so exciting."

Also at The Guardian.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD Ceases Graphics Driver Development for 32-bit Operating Systems

With the recent October releases of Adrenalin Edition, AMD has finally discontinued support for 32-bit operating systems. The latest 32-bit packages can still be manually downloaded through older driver release notes, of which Adrenalin Edition 18.9.3 is the last release with 32-bit drivers.

The change doesn't come as a surprise. Earlier this year, NVIDIA ceased driver development for 32-bit OSes, and early last year AMD dropped graphics driver support for 32-bit Windows 8.1. Pre-GCN hardware was moved to legacy status back in 2015. Ultimately, the idea is to concentrate development and engineering resources, particularly if those resources are limited. Over the past few years, AMD has put in a renewed effort in graphics driver development, retiring Catalyst for "Radeon Software" and embarking on major annual updates, both for gaming and professional products. In that sense, prolonging 32-bit support diffuses focus for very specific edge cases for little benefit, and that goes for both NVIDIA and AMD.

Previously: Nvidia to Stop Writing Drivers for 32-Bit Systems (Eventually)
Nvidia Ends Mainstream Support for Fermi GPUs and 32-Bit Operating Systems

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Nobody's Cellphone Is Really That Secure

There are two basic places to eavesdrop on pretty much any communications system: at the end points and during transmission. This means that a cellphone attacker can either compromise one of the two phones or eavesdrop on the cellular network. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. The NSA seems to prefer bulk eavesdropping on the planet's major communications links and then picking out individuals of interest. In 2016, WikiLeaks published a series of classified documents listing "target selectors": phone numbers the NSA searches for and records. These included senior government officials of Germany—among them Chancellor Angela Merkel—France, Japan, and other countries.

Other countries don't have the same worldwide reach that the NSA has, and must use other methods to intercept cellphone calls. We don't know details of which countries do what, but we know a lot about the vulnerabilities. Insecurities in the phone network itself are so easily exploited that 60 Minutes eavesdropped on a U.S. congressman's phone live on camera in 2016. Back in 2005, unknown attackers targeted the cellphones of many Greek politicians by hacking the country's phone network and turning on an already-installed eavesdropping capability. The NSA even implanted eavesdropping capabilities in networking equipment destined for the Syrian Telephone Company.

Alternatively, an attacker could intercept the radio signals between a cellphone and a tower. Encryption ranges from very weak to possibly strong, depending on which flavor the system uses. Don't think the attacker has to put his eavesdropping antenna on the White House lawn; the Russian Embassy is close enough.

The other way to eavesdrop on a cellphone is by hacking the phone itself. This is the technique favored by countries with less sophisticated intelligence capabilities. In 2017, the public-interest forensics group Citizen Lab uncovered an extensive eavesdropping campaign against Mexican lawyers, journalists, and opposition politicians—presumably run by the government. Just last month, the same group found eavesdropping capabilities in products from the Israeli cyberweapons manufacturer NSO Group operating in Algeria, Bangladesh, Greece, India, Kazakhstan, Latvia, South Africa—45 countries in all.

[...] Another way to hack a cellphone is to install a backdoor during the design process. This is a real fear; earlier this year, U.S. intelligence officials warned that phones made by the Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei might be compromised by that government, and the Pentagon ordered stores on military bases to stop selling them.

Original Submission